I’m going to answer both – starting with BlackBerry 10. The short answer is no – there will be no Theme Studio product for BlackBerry 10 and there will be no theme support in the BlackBerry 10 OS. We’ve worked diligently over the last year and a half with our design team to create a new user interface – focused around the idea of “flow”. While there are some great themes built for the current BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 is designed to provide users a unique experience that can be personalized in other ways, but will have a consistent look and feel in iconography and settings.

Our resources are focused on delivering a best in the industry developer experience and an astonishing end user experience. We’ve been wrestling with this decision for a while – but based on multiple factors, we’ve made the decision to not release Theme Studio 7. Once we looked at the final product, it was clear to us that it didn’t address theme developer needs or asks. In addition, feedback from our Theme Studio beta testers showed us that the quality of the tooling would not be acceptable.

Many theme developers have been using Theme Studio 6 to create themes for BlackBerry OS 7 and 7.1 devices. We even documented the process in a two-part series here on the blog. We encourage you to continue to explore the opportunities of BlackBerry 7 as our subscriber base has grown to 80 million globally.

What’s the silver lining? One word – Cascades. The work that you, our theme developers, have done in Theme Studio shows how amazing your creative talents are. We encourage you to unleash that creativity on BlackBerry 10 using Cascades to create stunning UI animations in apps. We have a number of resources on Cascades that can help you, and we encourage you to reach out for support from our dev relations team in our forums, on Twitter®, and at our events.

Most recently, here are sessions available from BlackBerry Jam Americas:

JAM65 – BlackBerry 10 Visual Style
JAM07 – Extreme Agile UX with Cascades
JAM09 – Fundamentals of the Cascades UI Framework
JAM04 – UI/UX: Finding your Flow

In addition, we have number of samples, help blogs, and webinars on Cascades, and we encourage you to look at the opportunities BlackBerry 10 app development offers. This includes our Built for BlackBerry and 10k Guarantee program.

This was not an easy decision to make and we know this isn’t easy for theme developers to hear, but we appreciate everything you’ve done – and are continuing to do – for the BlackBerry ecosystem. We hope you’ll join us in our new chapter as we’re committed to providing the most compelling mobile computing experience with the commercial launch of BlackBerry 10.

The new BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6 Public Beta 2 is now available for download on BlackBerry® Developer Zone, providing extensive support for new (and upgraded) BlackBerry® smartphones with BlackBerry 6 OS, as well as robust import functionality for theme projects created using previous versions of BlackBerry Theme Studio.

This beta release supports theme development for all BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 6, that are currently in-market, as well as simplified theme export for BlackBerry App World™ in order to quickly submit your BlackBerry 6 themes.

In addition, the Import feature has been expanded to allow for importing previous theme projects that targeted devices running versions of BlackBerry Device Software prior to BlackBerry 6. For instance, if a theme project was created in BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 targetting the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone series, you can follow three simple steps to import your theme settings from that project (such as icons, menu/dialog background patterns, fonts, and so on) to a BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone series project in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6:

1. Create a new project in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6:

2. Import the old project (created using BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0):

3. Export the project for the applicable BlackBerry smartphone:

Due to many changes to the base themes in the BlackBerry 6 OS, the Import feature can significantly reduce your effort by leveraging all previous settings that apply to the BlackBerry 6 theme. There are a notable set of theme items that are unique to BlackBerry 6, such as home screen banner, notification and application trays, and calendar icon (digits now appear in the calendar icon based on system date) that will still require configuration after the import, but the import capability gives you a big head start.

For best results during an import operation in BlackBerry Theme Studio , the most important consideration is the device screen size of the source theme project. For example, you can import a theme project targetting the BlackBerry® Tour™ 9600 smartphone series to a theme project targetting the BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone series, due to similar screen sizes. The easiest way to determine this by using View > Change Face Plate menu command.

Finally, the user interface for Theme Builder has been refined even more with intuitive views, tabs and icons used throughout the tool in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta 2. Also, the Background Wizard has been enhanced, making it easier than ever to create things like date-based wallpaper changes:

If you haven’t installed BlackBerry Theme Studio Public Beta 1, you can read about the many other new features on the beta page, including a redesigned user interface, easy Background Wizard, and batch import of graphics.

As we approach our final release candidate for BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, we would love to hear your feedback on your theme development experiences so far. Please provide us any bug reports or feature suggestions for BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 using the “Report Issue” option in the Help menu. Download the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta 2 now, and happy theming!

If you haven’t already heard about the newly announced BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta at DEVCON 2010, we are excited to cover all the details here in this post. The number of published themes on BlackBerry App World™ has grown tremendously since the introduction of the Themes category last year. To showcase this popular category, the latest BlackBerry App World 2.0 client features the top 25 downloaded BlackBerry® smartphone themes. So if you are looking to get your theme up on the list for BlackBerry 6 devices, I hope your BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 public beta tool and BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 simulator are already installed!

Let’s dive into the newly added features in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta.

Theme support for BlackBerry 6.0 OS devices

Using BlackBerry Theme Builder 6.0, theme developers can now create themes for the BlackBerry Torch 9800 device and publish them on BlackBerry App World. There are several new components that can be themed on BlackBerry 6, such as the new notification bar, popup context menu, and application icon tray. BlackBerry Theme Builder allows you to customize all these new components using the ‘BlackBerry 6′ layout.

The ‘custom’ layout provides a subset of those theme features similar to the custom layout in BlackBerry 5.0 touch screen devices like the BlackBerry® Storm2™ smartphone. However, there are some new additions to allow social feed notifications (BlackBerry® Messenger, Twitter®, Facebook®) and organizational items (Tasks, Memos) to now appear on the home screen as well!

Dynamic wallpaper designs

If you are looking to add some pizzazz to the home screen wallpaper, there are new options now available through the Background Wizard (accessed under the Home Screen tab). You can select a range of images to be cycled as the home screen wallpaper, scheduled periodically or at specific times. I can just sense some great dynamic seasonal themes coming my way this year!

BlackBerry Theme Builder user interface enhancements

We have been listening closely to the great community feedback and improved our tool UI a great deal in this release. If you have already used BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, the first thing you will notice is the streamlined user-interface, with the Inspector panel hidden by default.

In its place is the Quick Edit palette at the top of the workspace, which displays the options for the currently-selected element. The new Toolbar on the left side of the workspace lets you switch between Select Mode (where you click on any element to edit it) and Pan Mode (which moves the screen image, as in previous versions). You can also right-click on various components to set new image items or reset them to default.

Veteran theme developers will note that this effectively replaces the Inspector tab with an elegant “click-and-edit” context-sensitive interface. If you prefer the traditional Inspector palette, it can be shown by clicking in the lower right.

Also, in order to jumpstart your theme development, we have provided the ability to set fonts and images across all screens through easy-to-use dialogs, accessed under the Edit menu.

For example, you can apply the same font attributes to multiple screens using the new Change Fonts option.

Another convenient feature added is the ability to replace multiple images on different screens using Theme Studio. In order to do this, you simply create a nested folder structure containing all the images to be replaced, and import the one folder into the theme using the Edit > Change Images option. This is a quick way to initially import all your graphical assets into your theme before tweaking each image. It is essential to maintain the same directory structure and filenames as the base theme; the complete set of correctly sized and named icons can be found in the ‘samples\Themes\Images\BlackBerry6_360x480′ folder of your Theme Studio install folder (by default located in ‘Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0’).

Theme publishing

Finally, commercial theme developers can go to market faster by using the Publish to BlackBerry App World option in the Export wizard, which prepares the theme as an application package ready for upload on the BlackBerry App World Vendor Portal. You can even use it to easily upgrade the same theme to a newer version on BlackBerry App World through the Vendor Portal.

We would love to hear your feedback for on our Developer Issue Tracker and Community Forums!

At WES 2010, a lot of attendees expressed interest in deploying themes on enterprise devices. Themes can provide great value in their ability to apply corporate messaging and branding across all devices within an organization. IT departments can also help reduce support calls by placing links to key Java® and web applications on the home screen within enterprise themes. The freely-downloadable BlackBerry® Theme Studio 5.0 can be used to create and package enterprise themes, which are ready to deploy on BlackBerry® Enterprise Servers just like Java applications.

In addition to the brand-messaging benefit of themes, there are some practical uses for themes as well. For instance, enterprise themes can display corporate hotline information for misplaced phones on the security lock screen, which can double as an animated corporate-branded screensaver. Theme developers can create an animated company-branded lock screen in four easy steps:

1. Create two images using your favorite image editor – one with your company logo, and other with the misplaced phone hotline information.
2. Use the BlackBerry Composer tool to create an animation that transitions between the company logo and the hotline information, and export to a SVG file.
3. Launch the BlackBerry Theme Builder tool and set the animation SVG file as the background image on the Lock Screen.
4. Use the export option in Theme Builder to generate a COD and ALX file, which can be deployed on corporate devices.

Let us know about your enterprise theme development experiences, and feel free to ask us any questions you may have!

In addition to soccer fever in South Africa and blockbuster movies piquing your interest this summer, it is time to demonstrate your creative inclinations by crafting themes for the latest BlackBerry® smartphones – the BlackBerry® Pearl™ 3G smartphone and the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9650 smartphone.

At Dev Con 2009, our theme product teams unleashed the new, rebranded BlackBerry® Theme Studio 5.0. We are psyched to see the amazing uptake on this robust set of creative tools within the development community. The quality of themes available on BlackBerry® App World™ proves that developers are well aware of the opportunity to bring the best franchises and creative skins to market to millions of BlackBerry smartphone users.

So grab the latest BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 Service Pack 1 – which adds support for the latest BlackBerry smartphones – and get theming! If you are just getting started with theme development, you can dive into the developer video for learning the ropes, as well as these Inside BlackBerry posts on theme development:

BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 – Build your own BlackBerry Theme!
BlackBerry Theme Studio – Build your own BlackBerry Theme! (Part Two)
BlackBerry Theme Studio Tips: Using Adobe Photoshop

Have fun! Let us know about your latest creative brainstorms in the comments.

Thanks to everyone who attended our webcast presentation on BlackBerry® Theme Studio on Tuesday. We had a fantastic turnout which shows the growing interest in BlackBerry theme development. We received a number of really great questions during the question & answer period and we did our best to answer all of them. Although we ran out of time, we intend to post answers to all outstanding questions in our Theme Development Community Forum. We also invite you to post any follow-up questions about the webcast in this forum.

Stay tuned for announcements about future webcasts in our BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to register for the Developer Updates Newsletter to also receive updates about new development tools and developer tips & tricks. We hope you felt this presentation was valuable and look forward to seeing you online in future webcast presentations.

A recording of the presentation can be viewed for free from the webcast event site.

Thank you,

Mark Rathwell Dale Ducharme Jason Laughlin Mike Kirkup

Readers that closely followed the 2009 BlackBerry® Developer Conference will remember both the release of BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 and the open call for BlackBerry theme submissions to the BlackBerry App World™ team. Starting today, BlackBerry themes are now available for download within BlackBerry App World!

Our sister blog Inside BlackBerry has been covering the news from all sides with some great content. In addition to a post articulating theme submission requirements into BlackBerry App World, Inside BlackBerry also has the latest in a series of posts to help train burgeoning theme developers. Make sure to check it out and post a comment saying the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog sent you!

BlackBerry Themes now available in BlackBerry App World!
BlackBerry Theme Studio Tips: Using Adobe Photoshop

Explain the BlackBerry Theme Studio announcement in a nutshell.

The BlackBerry developer community has really been excited about using BlackBerry themes to personalize their BlackBerry experience. We wanted to do more to help our community of users in this respect so we’re announcing two things today. First, we’re now accepting themes in BlackBerry App World™. We’ll launch the category to consumers in December but theme creators can submit their themes starting today.

Second, we’re announcing BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0, the next version of the product formerly known as the Plazmic Content Developer’s Kit – or ‘CDK’ for short. We wanted to have a great new version of the product with some killer new features like adding ringtones and screen transitions and making themes for the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 and BlackBerry® Storm2™ smartphones. We also wanted to make the theme creation process even easier and we’ve got some great new enhancements here as well.

Why should the BlackBerry developer community be excited?

It’s generally far faster to make a theme than an app, especially due to the new BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, so it can be a lower development cost. The prices themes command are often comparable to an application and consumers want them. The BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 and BlackBerry App World announcements give developers the tool and the distribution channel too. Plus, you can use themes to market your apps, company and products etc.

If you’re interested in learning more about BlackBerry theme creation, make sure to check out these two exciting Inside BlackBerry posts!

BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 – Build your own BlackBerry Theme!
BlackBerry Theme Studio – Build your own BlackBerry Theme! (Part Two)